


The Right-Shaped Holes

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2018 [38]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood, Blood Loss, Drama, Friendship, Gallows Humor, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Strong Language, Violence, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-06 03:07:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16823893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: The war wreaks havoc on all, magical or otherwise.





	The Right-Shaped Holes

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [一个正好的枪口](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19237459) by [shelphy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shelphy/pseuds/shelphy)



“Why not just _accio_ it out?”  
  
“Because I don’t want to kill him, you fucking idiot!”  
  
“‘s only a flesh-wound,” Theseus mumbled.  
  
Graves eyed him disbelievingly. “Yeah, okay, go back to counting the flying cats in wonderland now, Scamander.”  
  
He knelt back down over Theseus’s torso, over the mess that used to unambiguously be his ribcage. Most of it was shrapnel- the real bugger was the bullet that had managed to lodge itself in one of his ribs. Graves was trying to pull it out now, and while he wasn’t simply _accio_ -ing it out, he had had the decency to use magic to numb the area before going to town on the rib in question with a pair of tweezers. Most of what Graves plucked from the wound was shattered bone and marrow, and he dropped the remains onto Theseus’s jacket. Theseus saw the little chunks, and his vision blurred.  
  
“I’m gonna be sick.”  
  
Graves jerked back as Theseus reared up and retched into the mud. This wasn’t quite a proper trench they were in, and there was only a thin canvas covering keeping the rain off them. Theseus eventually rolled onto his back again, panting weakly; at least the charm had stopped him from feeling the sort of pain one would associate with aggravating a broken rib. Graves went right back to work, but this time he dropped the bone into the mud too; clever man, he’d figured it out.  
  
“But sir, wouldn’t it just be easier to _accio_ it?”  
  
Graves grit his teeth. “No, it would not, because there’s no proper healers around here and I can’t heal the sort of damage that would come from just ripping the goddamn bullet out all at once.”  
  
“But sir-”  
  
“Belby, I swear to fucking _Christ_ , I am ten goddamn seconds away from putting a bullet through _your_ ribs. Stop questioning me and go find a goddamn healer if you’re so concerned!”  
  
Wisely, Belby backed off and Theseus lost sight of him. Graves was a man to be reckoned with when he was angry and he was swift enough to carry through on his threat and get back to work on Theseus in little time at all. Theseus stared dully up at the drenched canvas, twitching and flinching when Graves hit something that the charm couldn’t numb. His increasingly unsteady gaze wandered to his hand: When he’d doubled-up to vomit his left hand must have reflexively gone to his chest, because it was covered in blood.  
  
Blood. God.  
  
No wonder he was so light-headed. He was probably losing so much of it. Graves had a towel pressed to the edges of the injury, but it had long-since soaked through. The bullet had blown a decent hole in him, and Graves had widened it in his attempt to see what he was doing as he dug the remains of the bone and bullet out.  
  
Holes- heh. Maybe if Theseus stood just right, the wind would make a funny noise through it.  
  
Not too long after they’d met at the Somme, Theseus and Graves had come upon a bloody scene in No Man’s Land: Three dead bodies, riddled with bullet-holes, hanging by their long-dead necks from a bridge. They were eventually determined to be dead French wizards. And that was where Theseus had found Graves: He had been standing alone, looking up at them pensively with a half-finished cigarette between his fingers and a bottle of something fouler than Theseus’s watery beer on the ground by his feet; without looking away, he eventually leaned towards Theseus and said, “You think if the wind blows through ‘em the right way they make different sounds? Like a flute?”  
  
Theseus had choked on his beer and started coughing. “Merlin’s _beard_ , Percival!” He squawked, surprised and shamefully, darkly amused at the prospect.  
  
“It’s an honest question!”  
  
That had devolved into a half-serious, completely ridiculous conversation about how bodies did not have the right structure to make those sorts of sounds- unless maybe the wound was in the throat? No, probably not- maybe through the skull? Then it was a matter of pushing each other to go see for themselves, but by then they were drunk enough to devolve into hysterical laughter; bloody, monstrous laughter on the ravaged battlefields of France.  
  
“You think I’ll make noise if they string me up?” Theseus asked, mind growing foggier and harder to hold onto.  
  
“We already discussed that, Scamander,” Graves remarked calmly as he gave the tweezers a careful wiggle. “Not the right angle.”  
  
“Shame.”  
  
“There will be other corpses.”  
  
It was dark. Or was it? Was it nighttime, or daytime? Theseus couldn’t remember anymore. The world was fuzzy at the edges and Theseus was losing his ability to keep his thoughts straight. His memories were scattered on the ground with the pieces of his bone and blood and other mud-drenched flesh that was left behind from other patients, ones who weren’t as fortunate to have Graves for a makeshift surgeon. Graves was only one of a few wizards who understood muggle customs well enough to know how to manage well without magic.  
  
“Stay awake, Scamander,” Graves snapped from where he was working. “I’ve almost got it out.”  
  
“Huh.”  
  
“ _Awake_ , Scamander! That’s an order!” Graves frowned with intense concentration as he slowly, carefully, plucked out a significant piece of bullet. “Shit. That’s only half of it. I must have broken it.”  
  
“’M bleeding,” Theseus mumbled, vision blurring the blood on his hands. For a second he seemed to hallucinate: There was bright red blood on his coat, on Graves’s, on the ground, in the mud ( _puddles_ of it) and it was splattered all over the canvas.  
  
“I know. I’m almost done. Just hang in there, alright?”  
  
Theseus was tired, so tired. They’d been moving for days with little rest, and today they’d been fighting. The fight had keyed him up quickly and brought him crashing down just as fast. That was why he was tired: He needed to sleep. His eyes started to shut, and suddenly pain rose in his jaw- Graves had given him a swift, clumsy punch to the face to wake him up.  
  
“I said _stay awake!_ ”  
  
Dazed, Theseus could only obey.  
  
“Got it!” Graves smiled grimly as he dropped a significantly larger piece of bullet on the ground. “Let me check, let me be sure-” He poked and prodded again, and Theseus was so far gone that he didn’t even feel the pains that broke through. Graves plucked out a few small shards of metal and dropped them away. “-yeah, alright, that’s it. You’re good.”  
  
“Can I sleep?” That was what Theseus _meant_ to say, at any rate; it came out more as ‘Cannazleep.’  
  
“It’s alright, Scamander, I’m gonna heal you and close you up. It’s alright.”  
  
Theseus’s eyes rolled shut, and this time Graves didn’t slap him awake.  
  
Time passed in a haze of unconsciousness; Theseus was entombed in darkness, but bangs and yells and pokes and prods made it through the barrier and bothered him in his sleep. Discomfort rose and faded without really rousing him. Nothing penetrated deeply enough to rouse him. Eventually, though, the barrier weakened and Theseus slowly crawled back into the waking world.  
  
The first thing he noticed was that he was in a tent. So he probably wasn’t in a trench, as the tents he and the other wizards tended to pitch were hidden with magic on open land. He was packed into a bedroll, to the extent that he had to have been put there by someone else, deliberately. The second thing he noticed was the dull throb of pain in his abdomen. Theseus frowned and moved the arm he had unintentionally laid across it in his sleep, wincing as it ached with a dangerous promise of more serious pain. His mind struggled to collect itself and recall what had led to this, was it a serious injury or had he maybe just hurt himself and prioritized sleep over…  
  
Oh, no. Not this time. He’d been shot- he’d been standing out with his squadron, with Graves’s and Hampstead’s, and he’d suddenly felt like someone had sucker-punched him in the gut. It had taken a few minutes, passed during and after being dragged through the mud to cover while the others fought, for the depth of the pain to register: That was not a punch, nor was it a spell. It was a bullet, a _muggle_ bullet from a muggle sniper that he hadn’t seen, never mind had the time to anticipate blocking.  
  
And the third thing he noticed was the smell of Golliberry’s, a particularly strong (and foul) British Wizarding brand of cigarette that was almost exclusively smoked by-  
  
“You alright, Scamander?”  
  
Theseus tilted his head and squinted, adjusting to the light. Graves was seated by the mouth of the tent, courteously exhaling through the entryway rather than allowing the smoke to accumulate in the small space. He wasn’t even looking at Theseus, and somehow he’d managed to divine the fact that his friend was awake. “Yeah,” Theseus said, slowly trying to sit up and then giving up when the pain became too threatening. “I suppose.”  
  
Graves snorted. “You suppose,” He mocked, making a thin attempt at impersonating Theseus’s accent. He’d done his damndest, but much like Theseus couldn’t make a real distinction between Graves’s New York accent and his fellow Auror McMullen’s Boston one, Graves could not distinguish Theseus’s accent from the hodgepodge one Americans tended to adopt when they were trying to mimic a ‘standard’ British accent.  
  
“Not enough blood in my brain to think too well yet,” Theseus protested; as if on cue, he suddenly noticed the dull, pulsing throb in his skull.  
  
“Fair enough.” Graves turned and glanced back at him. “Think you’ll live?”  
  
“You tell me, Doctor Graves.”  
  
Graves snorted again, rolling his eyes as he turned back to the mouth of the tent. “‘Why don’t you just _accio_ it out’,” He mumbled, going for a much thicker accent now to mock Belby. “Fuck. I fucking hate wizards that don’t know how to solve problems without magic. Say what you want about muggles but they’ve built a functioning civilization without ever having to wave a wand to do it, and they’ll roll over us if they ever find out we exist.”  
  
“I see performing surgery makes you cheerier than usual.”  
  
“I see getting shot doesn’t inspire you to any stronger emotion than that mild British surprise.”  
  
“What would you like me to do, hm?” Theseus asked, shutting his eyes and setting his head down again. “Weep and wail at my latest brush with death? Steal a muggle gun and blow my brains out like Brayson did?”  
  
Graves didn’t respond. Theseus saw a puff of smoke appear over his shoulder.  
  
“Alright, whatever, have your mood,” Theseus grunted. “I’m going back to sleep.”  
  
“Whatever.”  
  
There was quiet for a moment, and Theseus shut his eyes and tried to drift off again. But it wasn’t the pain that kept him from it now. He sighed and opened one eye. “Thank you,” He said, loudly enough that Graves should have heard it just fine. “For patching me up, and for being smart enough not to just _accio_ the bloody bullet out.”  
  
A pause.  
  
“You’re welcome.”  
  
Another pause.  
  
“You should go to sleep. Put some blood back in your brain. God knows you don’t do so well on a normal day.”  
  
Theseus snorted. “G’night to you too, you ornery bastard.”  
  
Theseus eventually fell back asleep.  
  
Graves kept his vigil at the mouth of the tent until he woke again.  
  
-End


End file.
